Money can buy you a fine dog, but only love can make him wag his tail! (weekly crypto updates)

It is that time of the week again. Time to learn about our weekly crypto updates and see what has happened lately in the crypto world.

• Bitcoin: MicroStrategy still owns 130K Bitcoin at the end of Q3 2022 (this is 0.62% of all Bitcoin) and they announced they plan to hold long term. Lightning Network released an emergency update (the second in the last 30 days) after a critical bug was found to be causing LND nodes to fall out of sync with the network.

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• Ethereum: Vitalik commented that Ethereum is not ready for ETH ETFs and that the blockchain should focus on leverage and security audits at the moment. The ETH layer 2 scaling solution Arbitrum has seen a massive surge since its Nitro update in August, with the total number of transactions increasing more than x5 times. But this can be deceiving, as some believe the bad actors are driving this in order to receive a bigger airdrop for a future native token, following the Optimism token model. Rocket Pool experienced the greatest growth since the Merge, compared to all other liquid-staking derivatives (decentralized and user-friendly product with clever alignment mechanism, what would you desire more than that?).

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• Altcoins: Dogecoin went 94% up after Elon officially acquired Twitter, as he mentioned before that he would accept Dogecoin for a hypothetical premium subscription service (which is not so hypothetical right now). As Huobi stablecoin started depegging again, after October 11 and October 28, they announced they will delist HUSD and convert it into USDT 1:1. Aptos did it again, as they went offline following a defective fundraise, with over 300 people depositing into the IDO simultaneously and congesting the network ( wait a moment, 300?). MakerDAO members voted in favor of introducing eight Maker Improvement Protocols, activating a new vault to generate more revenue, and implementing MetaDAOs, smaller government entities. Polygon (MATIC) seems to do well, reaching an all-time high in Q3 for both active address setting and NFT activity, focusing next on ZK-scaling and pursuing an aggressive development strategy. BNB chain expectations for Q3 were met, according to their roadmap. AAVE user counts increased for the third straight quarter and more exciting stuff is on the pipeline for the last quarter of the year. USDD maintained its peg in the third quarter, and new 100K wallets were made, aside from this, nothing else changed much in the TRX ecosystem. The crypto-custodian Bitgo introduced wrapped Dogecoin to Ethereum blockchain, in a partnership with wDogeDAO.

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• Blockchain games and NFTs: There are two new hot collections on Opensea - Splinterlands' Runi and Art Gobblers (backed by the creator of Rick &Morty and Paradigm). I did buy a Runi, mostly to use it in the game. By the way, OpenSea now detects, and blocks stolen NFTs, also disabling the scam links, and trying to sort out the theft issue. Gamestop NFT marketplace added support for Immutable X, so now you can use it to sell stuff from our blockchain games on it. NBA star Steph Curry filed a trademark application for Curryverse on October 26, are we waiting for NFTs next? Instagram will let you craft, display, and sell your NFTs on their platform. Still, being part of Facebook, I do not like them as a platform, knowing they can associate my name with my wallets. Japanese sportswear manufacturer Asics announced today that the ones buying their new collection can win a limited STEPN NFT. More and more NFT marketplaces have now a zero-royalty fee structure, Looksrare being the latest to join the ranks. Crypto exchange Kraken is launching its own NFT marketplace. Wrestling Organization Online NFT pack sales ended in 90 seconds, quite disappointing to see that the game cares more for the whales than for the regular users (I would have expected some random designation allowing everyone to buy at least a few packs). The Pipeflare faucet seems to do some nice work using NFTs and their own games (for someone who has enough time to play them - great for long flights or train trips, when the WIFI is not great). This November I test Gods Unchained blockchain game, seems interesting, but I don't know anything about the profit potential.

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• Good news: Ripple is not receiving legal support from the crypto-advocacy group Blockchain Association, in their ongoing battle with the SEC. Hong Kong now wants to become a crypto hub, but before this announcement they imposed quite prohibitive regulations for crypto assets, so, we will see what happens next. The Monetary Authority of Singapore is testing DEFI, using AAVE to exchange tokenized versions of Singapore Government securities bonds with their Japanese counterparts and exchanging Japanese Yen for Singapore Dollars as a test. It seems that Binance invested $500M into Elon Must Twitter take-over, aiming to bring Twitter into Web3. In terms of total spot volume trading in September-October, Binance, AAX, and OKX volume raised, and Coinbase and FTX volume dropped. MoneyGram added a feature in the US, letting users buy, sell and hold BTC, ETH and LTC. The feature is supported by crypto exchange Coinme (MoneyGram made an investment into this exchange earlier this year). JP Morgan executed their first-ever trade using a DEFI on a public blockchain (Polygon).

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• Bad news: Crypto-exploits losses amount to $3B this year, with 44 exploits affecting 53 protocols, and leading to $657M losses just in October. MakerDAO co-founder mysteriously died in Puerto Rico after he suggested hours before his death that he is blackmailed by the CIA and Mossad. Dapper Labs laid off 22% of their staff (134 out of 613) as a larger reorganization strategy. Gala(GALA) got white-hacked, as one address minted over 1B worth of Gala tokens out of thin air. Later was confirmed that pNetwork, the routing infrastructure provider for Gala, was behind it, trying to drain a faulty CAKE pool. Coinbasenet revenue went down 28% compared to the previous quarter and their shares went down 8% over the past day (21% down over the past week). Local prosecutors found out that Do Kwon indeed manipulated the LUNA price, which everybody already knew, but was never proved. He denied this being true, as usual. Crypto exchange Deribit halted withdrawals after a $28M hack, informing its users that the cold storage was not affected and 99% of the user's funds are safe. Got a mail from Celsius informing me they are bankrupt and I should not send any crypto to them, as they will not send it back. What about my other crypto that you already have? Any news?

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• Joke of the week: I do not know how serious they can be, but Capapult Finance is planning to build a new stablecoin on the LUNA blockchain, using the MakerDAO model, where you can deposit interest-earning collateral and borrow the stablecoin. Just the name of the blockchain alone is giving me shivers, not to mention what happen when I add the idea of a stablecoin to this one. Good luck, Solid!

All the best,

George

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Why not...

...have fun and win rewards on my favorite blockchain games (Splinterlands- Hearthstone-like card game) (Mobox - GamiFI NFT platform) and (Rising Star - Music creators game).

...get the higher rewards for your investments using Blockfi. Get crypto while writing on Publish0x blog, using Presearch search engine to maximize your income with PRE tokens. Use Torum instead of Twitter . I am also writing for crypto on Read.cash and Hive.